His company have been the subject of many unfavourable news reports, which we have to be honest and say we haven’t centred in. We’d much rather concentrate on the innovation side of things.

Is it just us though who cannot get our heads around a sea of driverless cars on the road? Like some sci‐fi prophecy, but they always seem to end in a rather tricky situation!

Uber recently paused their Arizona driverless car programme. However, the ride‐hailing company said it hopes to resume self‐driving tests in Pennsylvania this summer.

The firm said it was committed to self‐driving technology and “looked forward to returning to public roads”.

Apple, one of the early innovators and are still pushing ahead and recently signed a deal with Volkswagen to turn some of the carmaker’s new T6 Transporter vans into Apple’s self‐driving shuttles for employees.

Meanwhile, China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) has released national guidelines for smart internet-connected cars, giving local authorities a freer hand to arrange road tests for autonomous vehicles.

“Developing smart internet connected cars has great significance to China,” said Xin Guobin, vice minister of MIIT. “The US, Europe, and Japan have all made smart cars an important focus.”

“Local authorities can arrange road tests based on their specific conditions and coordinate all parties more conveniently,” said Xin. “Enhancing transportation safety and substantially bringing down accidents should be the priority for smart cars. Safety is not only a premise but also a bottom line.”

Here in the UK, the belief is that research from university‐linked start‐ups and relaxed regulation will be key. One such start‐up Wayve is building what it describes as “end‐to‐end machine learning algorithms” to make autonomous vehicles a reality, an approach it claims is different from much of the conventional thinking on self‐driving cars.

So it would appear the future is driverless and we need to go and have a laydown and get our head around it!